HATTIESBURG — On the road from Malibu to the airport, Jerrell Powe left his lane.

Powe was riding with his friend, fellow NFL player and Mississippi native Eugene Sims, one day this August when the 49ers strength and conditioning coach Ray Wright called. Sims pulled over, and Powe got out of the car. The 49ers wanted to sign Powe.

“What do you want to do?” Wright asked.

Powe thought about it. The back problems. The limp in his right leg. The wrist that doesn’t bend. The anxiety attacks. The atrial fibrillation in his heart. The risk of CTE. Did he really want to go to another new city, live out of a hotel until he knew if he made the team, bus to practice until he found a place and live somewhere he simply didn’t know?

He then thought of his 2-year-old son, Jayce.

It was a painful path which led Powe to this point. It took three years to become academically eligible at Ole Miss. He fell to the sixth round of the NFL Draft, a slide he attributes to already being 24 years old. He played for three teams in six seasons. There were health scares along the way.

No, he decided. It was time for something else.

“Man, I don’t think I want to do it anymore,” Powe told Wright.

Powe got in the car, flew to Mississippi and started the rest of his life. Like generations of retired pro athletes before him, Jerrell Powe was now in between two places: what he always wanted and what comes after.

Powe believes in that advice. He lives by it. He played football because it’s what he knew. He worked at the Wayne County jail while he tried to get into school and now is getting a degree in criminal justice. His grandfather, uncle and cousins were truck drivers, and now Powe is starting a trucking business.

People’s lives are often dictated by the lane they started in, but how do you change that?

Powe didn’t have a father figure until people like Joe Barnett, Judge Dewayne Thomas, Jim Carroll, and Marvin Chapman filled that role. Barnett, a Wayne County teammate's father, is who Powe considers his real father, and he helped Powe get his grades in order. Chapman, his defensive line coach at Wayne County High School, was his “spiritual adviser.” Carroll led Powe's NCAA fight and taught him discipline.

Powe's life got on the right track when the father figures came into his life. Now he has the chance to give Jayce a father from the start. He already beats himself up for missing time in Jayce's first two years because of football. Jayce lives in Houston with his mother, but Powe makes the time to see him as much as possible.

Jerrell Powe, right, and one of his mentors, Joe Barnett, center, chat with then-Wayne County defensive coordinator Kelly Morphy in this file photo.(Photo: The Clarion-Ledger)

Melvin Mathis, one of Powe's closest friends, said Powe always talked about wanting kids. He just wants to ensure his son begins in a better lane than he did.

“Jayce is the reason that Jerrell does a lot of the things he does today,” said Tyson Jackson, Powe’s former Kansas City Chiefs teammate.

Football was Powe’s road toward a better life, maybe his only one. Now Powe is back at school and finishing his degree. He’s jumping into the business world. He’s providing Jayce with options.

Mathis said Powe drains himself trying to live to the expectations of others. He works so hard to make people around him happy and leaves himself anxious and in pain.

He's the kind of person to call and make sure Mathis's company — Elite Mobile Car Wash and Detailing in Oxford — gets mentioned.

Powe played against former Brookhaven star Jimmy Johns in high school, and the two have remained friends. Johns grew up poor — he and his family grew their own food and boiled water from the creek because they didn’t have running water. Powe didn’t grow up much different, eating bread and mayonnaise or bread and syrup.

That life will always be at Powe’s core, Johns thinks. Powe doesn’t need much more than that. But when Johns was on FaceTime with the Powe the day after the latter’s retirement party last month, Powe had to call him back. Powe had a business meeting.

“What we’re working on is generational wealth,” Johns said. “He’s going to maintain so Jayce doesn’t have to go through what he went through.”

Powe’s home is tucked, somewhat alone, in the back of a cul de sac in Hattiesburg. His Escalade is parked out front. Some old-school Nelly is playing loudly when the doorbell rings.

When he opens the door, he’s wearing the same green No. 41 Under Armour shirt he sported at the 2011 NFL Combine. Tennis is playing on the TV. Some memorabilia is on the floor, and more are propped against the walls. He’s still settling in.

Powe’s days since retirement have been pretty straightforward. He works out just about every day. He, Jackson and former teammates Anthony Toribio promised each other they would lose weight when football was over, so Powe is trying to lose 40 or 50 pounds. A lot of his time is spent organizing his memorabilia, finding rings he lost over the years. He works on business ideas.

He’s also working on finishing his criminal justice degree at Ole Miss.

Powe has more reason to hate school than most people. The system failed him. The NCAA denied him eligibility. When he did meet its requirements, the NCAA questioned it and made him wait another year. Then, he had to spend a year at Ole Miss on financial aid before joining the team.

Yet Powe doesn’t hate school. He doesn’t resent it. He used to, when he was getting up at 6 a.m. to march and salute the flag at Hargrave (Va.) Military Academy, trying to improve his grades while reading years of articles about his academic struggles and the anonymous commenters that said he’d soon be working at a car wash back in Wayne County. There was a six-month span when Powe didn’t go out or talk to people because of embarrassment.

Now, he takes responsibility for most of it — even if much wasn’t his fault. He says he could have done more earlier to get his grades up.

“The two things I promised myself when I decided to retire was I was going to take weight loss seriously, and I was going to finish school,” Powe said. “Not only for myself, but for my child who depends on me.”

He originally wanted to take that criminal justice degree into law enforcement. He’s always been interested in the Secret Service. But he’s too big for that now, he said, and being involved with the police has lost its luster these days because of the danger and the constant backlash directed towards officers.

Powe is in the process of getting into the trucking business. It’s what he knows. Retirement won’t be too different for Powe, Jackson said, because Powe was always a progressive thinker and was always focused on how to succeed in business after football. Jackson thinks Powe’s real calling might be politics. Powe has said he might run for sheriff one day.

Powe doesn’t know for sure what’s next, but he has the freedom to make it what he wants.

“The first 30 years have been good,” he said. “Now I’m just trying to figure out what it is that I like to do and want to do for the next 30 years.”

Former Wayne County football standout Jerrell Powe (right) and his mentor Joe Barnett (center) chat with Wayne County defensive coordinator Kelly Morphy while visiting Powe's old school on Thursday. The Clarion-Ledger

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There’s a scene in Chad Nielson’s story for SBNation, “The Hargrave Four,” in which Powe and fellow five-star recruit Callahan Bright are back in the barracks at Hargrave Military Academy in 2005 after a combine for college coaches:

Bright and Powe talked about how easy life would be once they got to the NFL. "I just knew for sure," Powe says, "we all were going to be there one day."

Powe was the only one who made the NFL, and life was never as easy as they all dreamt. This isn’t some story about how hard the NFL was. Powe loves football and misses it plenty, texting his buddies before and after games, giving them his critiques.

He loves talking about the people he respects — how Jimmy Johns is the best high school player he played against, J.J. Watt is the best overall player and hardest worker, Marshall Yanda is the best offensive lineman and Jackson and Toribio are the best teammates.

Football takes a toll, though. Powe started having panic attacks when he made it to the NFL. The league was his dream, but that dream comes with stresses.

He had to memorize the whole playbook, take hits constantly, deal with the mental pressures and still worry about keeping his job. There were 30 people watching him every day and 100 people out there trying to take his spot.

Claustrophobia brings the panic attacks on. He doesn’t use bathrooms on planes or busses. He refuses to ride an elevator alone, so he has waited by one for hours for somebody else to come along. Fatigue causes them, which is why he doesn’t really go out or stay late at clubs. Depression is a factor. He doesn’t want Jayce to be around him when the attacks hit.

“That shit is scary,” Powe said. “It really is. It’s scary.”

Jerrell Powe and Melvin Mathis out at a party together. Mathis is one of Powe's closest friends.(Photo: Melvin Mathis)

Mathis said Powe will call friends in the middle of the night to come over and lay with him during an attack. He wakes Mathis to go sleep downstairs on the couches in the living room with him, half of Powe's 300-something pound body on the couch, the other half on the floor.

Football players don’t usually talk about these things. They can’t really. Any sign of issue or injury could cost them their jobs. It’s a profession almost entirely dependent on physical or mental strength. Powe’s body, on top of his mind, took on plenty of damage for the game.

“Have you ever seen a grown man this hard that just can’t really lay in the bed and sleep?" Mathis said.

Powe would prefer Jayce didn’t play football. He wouldn’t stop him if that’s what Jayce wanted to, but his preference would be that his son would take up basketball or baseball or something else entirely.

Powe didn’t have those options. He saw one real lane to make a better life for himself: Football.

Before Powe retired, he and Sims went to dinner. Sims wanted to take Powe somewhere nice while he was in Malibu. They went to Nobu. Two black men from small-town Mississippi eating a fancy meal, looking out at the water and debating their futures.

Powe had a choice about what came next. Despite every dig made at his expense, every time he wondered if he should quit, he changed his life’s circumstances.

There will come a day in January in which Powe will be in an Ole Miss classroom again. He’s been taking online classes this fall but will be in Oxford in January, when the next semester begins.

It’s going to be a weird experience. He knows that. School won’t be a step toward the NFL. It is the primary focus now. Powe said he just prays he’s not in a class with Benito Jones — another star Wayne County defensive lineman who Powe has helped mentor — or somebody else he knows. He doesn’t want to mess around or have fun there. He wants to keep to himself and get to work.

While Powe sits in that classroom and finishes up his degree, one people didn’t think he’d ever get, it’s not going to be about criminal justice, the trucking business or whatever Powe decides to do with the next 30 years. That’s the fun part. That’s where he can decide what he really enjoys.

The degree is going to be about Mississippi, about fatherhood, and about making sure the next generation’s lane is better than your own.

“[Jayce] is gonna get his grades,” Powe said. “He is not going to take the road his daddy did.”